Following its latest meeting, the ERPB (set up by the ECB as a successor to the SEPA Council), says that it has agreed to “endorse the vision” of allowing anyone to carry out a pan-European P2P mobile payment using a “simple method”.
At the moment, says the board, there is fragmentation among providers, with around 50 local systems. Any new offering should seek to work with these, rather than try to provide a competitor.
To get interoperability, outfits offering P2P payments should make the most of existing infrastructure such as SEPA and IBANs, and build a harmonised process to allow data like mobile phone numbers, email addresses and IBANs to be exchanged across borders.
Meanwhile, the ERPB has told the European Payments Council to report back in November 2015 on plans for a pan-European instant payments system.
The board set the wheels in motion for a system in December 2014 after expressing concern that the emergence of new domestic platforms, such as the UKs Faster Payments scheme, might end up creating a fragmented market in Europe for instant payments, similar to what existed in regular payments in the past.
Having set up a task force and issued an initial assessment, the ECB will now come up with a proposal for the design of an instant SEPA Credit Transfer scheme, which could be adhered to by EU payment service providers on a voluntary basis.
Every day we send out a free e-mail with the most important headlines of the last 24 hours.
Subscribe now